The governor of the state of Tennessee has said it as directly as possible: The university itself is imperiled unless UT’s football team wins games and fills its stadium.

“If you want to be bottom line about it, it shows why UT-Knoxville has to be good in football,” Haslam said. “You have a whole program that’s set up with a 100,000-seat Neyland Stadium, and it’s a program that supports all the other sports other than basketball and provides scholarships back to the university.”

And – he didn’t need to add since everyone knows it – the school, entirely because of sports, currently carries TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in debt. Yeah baby you read that right. So there have to be bodies in UT’s big new incredibly expensive stadium; the team has to win…

Only it’s losing, see, so the stadium’s kind of empty and all the coaches that doomed the team and the school have to be paid off in the millions of dollars to go away and WOW! Where can the rest of America sign up? What a great way to run a university!

of General Neyland, who was, as a matter of fact, a brigadier general. As well as the winningest football coach that Tennessee has ever seen, and presumably ever will see. My wild surmise is that it’s both fortunate and unfortunate for UT that he’s dead.